The Summer Queen (64 page)

(I’m losing you .... It’s breaking up .... )

(BZ ... the mers, ask ... BZ—) But only silence answered
her, and she felt herself falling again, back through the conduit of night ....

Coming to in the reality she knew, she found herself still
clutching the cold marble table-edge, blinded like an insect by the artificial
lamplight of her office. Gradually her vision cleared, and her eyes registered
the concerned face of her husband gazing back at her across the cluttered desk.

“Moon—?” Sparks murmured. “Are you all right?”

Moon nodded, slumping forward, propping her head in her
hands. “Yes.”

“A Transfer?” he asked, with a matter-of-factness in his
tone that his expression did not quite support.

She nodded, lifting her head again as strength began to come
back to her. Her time in that nameless otherwhere had drained her more than the
Transfer normally did; she wondered whether the contact had broken because
their physical bodies—or their sanity—had reached some limit of endurance. “How
long was I—like that?”

Sparks shook his head. “Maybe five minutes.”

She felt a brief pang of disbelief. “Only that long? Did I
say anything?”

He looked surprised. “No. It was like a trance. You didn’t
move the whole time.” Something passed across his face that suggested he had
not been particular!) comfortable during the wait.

Moon sat silently for a moment, as all she had experienced,
and felt, rose into her conscious mind. “It was BZ Gundhalinu, Sparks,” she
whispered.

“Who?” he asked, uncomprehending. And then his face changed.
“Him,” he said, and his voice was curiously flat. “Why—?”

“He told me the Hegemony has found a source of stardrive plasma,”
she answered, the words dropping like stones between them. She stood up,
suddenly too restless to remain sitting.

“What?” Sparks actually laughed, his disbelief was so complete.
“That’s impossible. There’s no source of stardrive plasma within a thousand
light-years—”

“He said that Fire Lake is made of stardrive plasma.”

“Fire Lake? I’ve heard of that. But that’s ...”He shook his
head, looked up again. “It’s actually true?”

Moon nodded, folding her arms against her stomach. “The Hegemony
is building starships.”

He jerked as if he had been struck. “So they can come back
here.”

“Yes.”

“How soon?”

She let her hands fall. “He thinks no more than three or
four years.”

“Three or four years—?” His face filled with the stunned
disbelief that had torn the center out of her own existence only moments
before. His eyes went on gazing at her, but for a long space they did not seem
to register anything at all. “I thought we were safe.” He looked away.

/ thought we were safe. Moon looked down at her own hands,
saw them clenched, white-knuckled, on the table’s littered surface.

“You learned all this in Transfer?” He glanced up at her
finally, half frowning. “From Gundhalinu himself?”

“Yes.” Moon sat down in her seat, brushing a loose strand of
hair out of her eyes. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It was as if
I’d been drawn into the Nothing Place—the mind of the computer itself. And yet
somehow he was there too; not physically, but like a ... spirit. We could speak
freely ....”

He shook his head, still half frowning. “You’re sure it was
really him?”

And not the sibyl mind. “The net has never spoken to me like
that .... It hasn’t spoken to me at all, since it made me Queen.” She heard
something that was almost forlorn creep into her voice. She looked up again, at
his dark surprise. “I’m sure it was him.” She went on, telling him the rest of
it, watching him; feeling herself watched, in turn. “... He said that he
intends to come back with them. As the New Chief Justice.”

Sparks stared at her, his entire body suddenly rigid. “Why?”
he asked at last.

Moon looked down. “He wants to help us. He feels responsible
for what he’s done to Tiamat, by making it possible for the Hegemony to return.”

“Why?” Sparks asked again, roughly.

She raised her head. “He said ... he said that he still
loves me.”

Sparks sucked in a small breath, and did not ask the
question that Moon saw come into his eyes.

She did not answer it. She glanced away, across the room;
saw her own face looking back at her from a mirror on the wall. Seeing another
woman there, in her memory—one with the face of a young girl. Not even certain
whether it was herself she was remembering, or Arienrhod ... She looked away. “We
need his help,” she murmured. “Tiamat does. You know what this means. The Hegemony
will want to control Tiamat full time. And we won’t be able to stop them.”

“I know,” he said, his voice strained. “The water of life ...
they’re going to want it. They’ll take it, if they can.” His jaw tightened. “And
I don’t see how even Gundhalinu can prevent that.”

“I told him the truth about the mers. That they’re sentient.”
She wove her hands together on the tabletop, finger by finger, tightening. “I
don’t know if he believed me .... But the information is there for anyone to
see, in the sibyl network. If he can make the Hegemony acknowledge that—”

“He can’t,” Sparks said angrily. “Lady’s Eyes, Moon—they don’t
want to know!” His voice hardened. “The ones who want the water of life don’t
care about anything but what it can do for them. They don’t have to—they’re the
ones with the power. They don’t give a damn about anyone’s suffering; as long
as it doesn’t hurt them. And mers aren’t even human. You’re talking about the
ones who run the Hegemony, and they aren’t going to listen.”

Moon rose to her feet, staring at her own reflection across
the room. “They will listen, this time.” She touched the trefoil dangling
against her linen shirt. “Because there’s more. It’s not just about the
morality of committing xenocide; it’s about enlightened self-interest.” She
turned back to him, leaning forward on the table. “Because the mers are the
key. They have to survive, or the ... or ...” Something was happening behind
her eyes, like the beating of dark, enormous wings. They tumbled her thoughts
into chaos, stopping the words in her throat.

“They’re ... they’re the ,” She pushed away from the table,
falling back into her chair.

“Moon—?” Sparks reached out to her.

“I ... can’t ....” She shuddered, as something inside her
collided with an impenetrable wall. “I can’t ... tell you. I can’t ... ever
tell anyone.” She shook her head. Her thoughts began to clear, the black wings
slowly furled, as she surrendered to the sibyl mind and its compulsion, still
controlling her, holding her under its geas. That Carbuncle is the pin in the
map. That the computer itself lies here—the secret heart, the hidden mind, of
the sibyl net. No one could ever be allowed to know its hiding place, because
that would make it vulnerable, and its reason for existence would be lost,
along with its secrecy. The people it had been created to serve could not be
trusted. And so she could not be permitted to reveal its existence here; or the
mers’ reason for existence, even if saving them meant saving itself.

It had chosen her to do its work ... but now she suddenly
understood that it did not trust even her completely. She would not be allowed
to share her secret with anyone, no matter how vital it was to the success of
her task, to saving the mers, to saving the net itself. She had to save them,
somehow, without letting the enemy know the one thing that might make them
willing to compromise. Because she could never tell anyone why.

She turned away from Sparks’s confusion, the sound of her
name being spoken again in urgent concern, and went wordlessly out of the room.

The small trimaran nosed in toward moorage at the docks, its
engines tactfully silent. Moon Dawntreader stepped down onto the mortared stone
surface of the landing wearing the heavy woolens and kleeskins of a Summer
sailor, with her hair in braids. She knotted the forward mooring rope to an
iron post in the chill shadows below the cliff-face; turned, with her
cold-stiffened hands resting on her hips, to gaze at what lay waiting for her.

There was no one else on the pier, or on the ancient steps
that zigzagged up the dun-colored sandstone slope to the town above. Here and
there the steps showed the near-whiteness of fresh patching. A basket attached
to a winch-rope, for hauling the day’s catch and other goods up the cliff, sat
empty on the stones. Up above was the Goodventure clan’s ancestral claim, which
lay a day’s travel north of Carbuncle. During High Winter it had been completely
inaccessible, permanently buried under snow. But with the coming of spring it
had been reborn; she could see the green of new grasses spilling over the cliff’s
edge, limned by sunlight against a rare, perfectly blue sky. Seeds that had
lain dormant beneath the snow had neither failed nor waited in vain .... The
sight of green high above the bleak, barren shore was a testament to faith and
change.

Moon took a deep breath, looking down again. There were
thirty or forty other craft clustered at the docks, bobbing offshore, tied up
along the pier or pulled up onto the narrow, stony beach below the cliff. Hers
must be among the last to arrive for the triad of festival days. To find
mooring space had not been the Lady’s luck: a place had been reserved for her,
as Summer Queen.

Tradition dictated that she should be the one to oversee
these annual celebrations. By rights they should have been held on ancestral
Dawntreader lands, because she was the Queen. But the Dawntreaders were an
obscure clan, whose few members had been scattered across the far islands of
Summer. They did not even have a meaningful holding here in the north, but
lived randomly spread among the other Summer families, as they always had. And
she had neglected her traditional duties more and more over the years; she had
always been too busy defying her heritage to make the time for them.

And so Capella Goodventure had come to oversee the festivals
that were held every year at the annual midsummer of Tiamat’s orbital passage
around the Twins—the ages-old festivals that must have given rise to the
Festival of the Change, When Winter and Summer changed places in the revolving
cycle of time. The Great Festivals of the Great Year had become tied to the
cycle of offworld exploitation and onworld ignorance only after the Hegemony
began coming to Tiamat. Remembering those things, she felt her resolve
strengthen, and her belief that she was doing the right thing.

Behind her Moon heard Anele and Tammis come out of the small
trimaran’s protected cabin onto its deck. Ariele looked sullen and annoyed, as
usual. She shielded her eyes, gazing out across the sea to avoid having to
acknowledge her mother. Tammis simply looked glum and uneasy. There was no one
else on board. She had brought them here herself; had wanted to feel her own
hands on the ropes and tiller, needed to prove to herself that she had not completely
lost touch with her past.

Beyond the bright forms of her two children she saw another
ship coming in, on a course that would ease it in beside her own craft to a
precariously tight moorage. Miroe and Jerusha had followed her up the coast, at
her request; not just as guardians, but to help her in what she had to do.

Ariele crouched down suddenly at the stern of the boat’s
deck, watching intently until a familiar brindle-furred head broke the water
surface. Ariele whistled shrilly and the merling swam toward her, meeting her
outstretched hand with a sleek, wet caress. “Silky!” she murmured. “You came. I
knew you would ... beautiful Silky.” The young mer regarded her with rapt
attention as she slid into a series of hums and whistles. Tammis stood behind
her, watching silently, listening for the mer’s response.

Moon felt wonder strike her, as she watched her daughter and
the mer. The merling had followed Ngenet and Jerusha up the coast all the way
from their plantation. It was a triumph of sorts, and not a small one, that
they had successfully communicated their request. And beyond that, Silky had
trusted them—loved them—enough to leave her home in Ngenet’s bay, and the mer
colony that had adopted her, to journey this far with them.

But in this moment Moon was not sure whether the mer’s presence
here, or Ariele’s gentle joy as she touched the face of her sea-friend,
astonished her more. In the city, in the palace, Ariele showed her nothing but
defiance and thorns; until there were times anymore when she looked at her
daughter’s face and could not remember any emotion but anger or pain. When all
she saw in that face so like her own was Arienrhod. Arienrhod. But in this
fragile, unguarded moment she had glimpsed the beautiful spirit of the child
she remembered: it was still there, only hidden, like a bud beneath the snow,
waiting for spring to come in its own time.

Moon turned back as Jerusha and Miroe came along the pier
toward her. She crossed the dock to meet them, smiling.

“We made it,” Jerusha said, her own pride and relief
reflected in her husband’s face.

Moon nodded, gripping their hands. “We’ve come two thirds of
the way. The third part is the hardest.” She glanced at the steps leading up
the cliff face. “I hope we haven’t come this far for nothing.”

Jerusha smiled faintly. “Well, there’s strength in numbers.”
She gestured toward the way up.

Moon looked back at them, hesitating, and shook her head. “First
I have to go alone. I have to show the Goodventures that I’ve come in humility
and without arrogance ... or there’s no point. It will be hard enough to make
them hear me out as it is, without—” She broke off, looking down; looked up
again into their faces:  offworlder faces. The faces of the Enemy, even more
than her own was, to Capella Goodventure. She had long since stopped seeing
anything unusual about the appearance of either of them. But she saw now, with
sudden clarity, how they would stand out among the tradition-bound Summers up
on the plateau. “Let me bring her here to you ... and Silky.” She glanced away
at the water.